Conservatives' War Against Gay and Black Kids Gets Personal

The wave of book-banning initiated by Republicans eager to gain electoral advantage by creating a culture war is going to have effects for years to come, because not only are they yanking books off of library shelves, they’re driving experienced librarians out of the profession. 

The American Library Association has been tracking book-banning for two decades, and 2021 set a record for the number of books challenged. The censorship efforts of the past year focused largely on eradicating books with LGBTQ content or content about people of color, the damage to kids is concrete: Only straight white kids are to see themselves reflected on library bookshelves, and other kids are not only being deprived of representation, their identities are being explicitly attacked as dirty and inappropriate.

These attacks on books increasingly come with direct attacks on librarians.  In Annandale, New Jersey, a parent calling for the removal of two books from a high school library attacked librarian Martha Hickson by name, saying that allowing a 16-year-old to check out the books “amounts to an effort to groom our kids to make them more willing to participate in the heinous acts described in these books. It grooms them to accept the inappropriate advances of an adult.”

The two books, Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, were both well-reviewed and both received Alex Awards from the ALA. But to a parent upset that her teenager has access to LGBTQ content no matter how glowing the reviews have been, they can be nothing but manuals for perversion.

Tim Anderson, a Virginia state representative, filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn the names of librarians at a library where some parents had complained about books. “The question is, how are pervasively vulgar books getting into the schools?” he said. “Is it the librarians that are doing this?”

It is, in fact, a librarian’s job to read book reviews and procure well-reviewed books. It’s not like they’re out there combing through porn shops for books—just about every time I’ve seen the name of a book that was being challenged and looked up information about it, its pedigree has included multiple positive reviews in trade journals.  But the people calling for books to be banned do not care about the quality of those books, or what kids might learn from them, or how kids might find solace and support in them. They want books that reflect LGBTQ experiences and Black experiences gone. They want books that oppose racism gone.

In Llano County, Texas, a librarian was fired for refusing to remove Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me from library shelves. The latter is a National Book Award winner that was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.

The New York Times talked to multiple librarians who quit their jobs after 18 or 19 years because of the attacks not just on books but on themselves.  “It was so horrific to see that my words were being used as a rallying cry for the book censors, and to see that my conversation had been misrepresented,” said Debbie Chavez, a Texas librarian who resigned after a parent recorded her without her knowledge and posted excerpts of their conversation about Lawn Boy on Facebook. “And I was supposed to still get dressed and go to school and do my job.”

“There were comments about library staff, calling us groomers and pedophiles and saying we needed to be fired, we need to be jailed, we needed to be locked up, that all the books needed to be burned,” an Arkansas librarian said of her decision to quit. “It got to a certain point where I thought, do I want to live here? Is this something I can subject myself to?”

Then there’s the trend of Proud Boys physically intimidating staff and attendees at library events. It’s happened in Indiana. And North Carolina. And California.

It’s not enough for the censors to attack books. They’re going after the professional ethics and expertise of librarians. They're turning disagreements over content into a vicious personal battle against public servants for doing their jobs. But that makes sense, because the disagreements over content come from the bigoted desire to ensure that kids only see one way of existing reflected as appropriate and acceptable. Once you’re committed to isolating and stigmatizing huge numbers of kids, why wouldn't you do the same to librarians? You’ve already decided that anyone who gets in your way, even by merely existing, is disposable.